Posted
by
timothyon Tuesday July 02, 2013 @10:08AM
from the war-you-can-win dept.

diegocg writes "Recent browser benchmarks are showing surprising results: in 'a geometric mean of all four performance-based categories: Wait Times, JavaScript/DOM, HTML5/CSS3, and Hardware Acceleration,' Firefox 22 'pulls off an upset, replacing the long-time performance champion Google Chrome 27 as the new speed king.' (Other browsers benchmarked were IE10, Opera 12, and Opera Next.) With these results, and Firefox developers focusing in fixing the UI sluggishness, can this be the start of a Firefox comeback, after years of slow market share decline?"

Real adblock that stops unnecessary downloads makes more performance difference at this point, than any sort of rendering engine chances. It has the nice side effect of limiting how much tracking of you goes on too.

Why be tied to anything? At work, I only use 2, depending on what I'm doing. At home, I use 3. I used to be a FF aficionado, but have strayed as its memory hogging has bloated. Now, I typically stick to Chrome except when things don't work. Then I resort to IE or FF. Do we really have to decide whether we want burgers OR tacos for the rest of our lives, or just pick according to floating whims?

Depends on how you use it. [In my experience] Chrome does well with Netflix, but flakes out when my wife is trying to play FB games. FF will play her games, but cannibalizes itself on memory if she does it for long - IE does better (as dirty as I feel saying that.) Chrome and FF come out as about a wash for casual browsing but, for reasons that may be irrational, I've leaned toward Chrome ever since FF ticked me off for blowing out memory when my wife was gaming. [Damn you Candy Crush! I used to actual

Wake me up when the Chrom(e/ium) console is better. Yes, both allow tab-completion of properties of an object. However (as a contrieved example), say you have an object "foo" that has a method "bar" that returns an object of type "baz". In both, I can type "foo.b" and select the "bar" method. But in Firebug, I'm able to write "foo.bar()." and autocomplete properties of "baz". If you're working with something like ExtJS it's godsend. Also the network tab is much more useful in Firebug - in Chrom(e/ium) one can sort by type, but there's no way to show only requests of a certain type.

Another vote for Privoxy. I recently switched to Privoxy from Ghostery, and have found it much faster. The addon-based ad-blockers seem to have some overhead, because they have to traverse the DOM and generally interact with the browser's rendering pipeline. I found my RAM usage in Firefox significantly declined, and the browser got much more responsive, after I removed Ghostery. Privoxy does the same job in some fast C code that runs in its own process, outside the browser.

As a side note, it's the modern descendent of the Internet Junkbuster, so has been around just about as long as internet advertising has been.

Real adblock that stops unnecessary downloads makes more performance difference at this point, than any sort of rendering engine chances. It has the nice side effect of limiting how much tracking of you goes on too.

You mean like the size of the SSD and the RAM makes more of a difference in the long term usability of your laptop than whether it has an 1,7 or 1,8 GHz Core i5 CPU? That still does not stop people from trying to wring a 40% discount out of the fact that the thing 'only' has the 1,7 GHz CPU when you try to sell it.

I don't get the love for Chrome among geeks. Why would anyone willingly use a browser funded by a search giant who makes money off of scouring your privacy and already has a history of handing things over to the NSA?

I don't think Firefox has leaked memory for some time, except for some add-ons. If you've read any of the last few Browser Grand Prix comparisons at Tom's Hardware, Firefox has become decent.

But there was a long stretch when Chrome was clearly superior, and even now Firefox occasionally has some pauses that I just don't see in Chrome. I just hope Firefox continues to succeed because I don't want "one browser to rule them all", even if that browser is built on an open source core.

Neat test but I think the summary could at least clarify that the test system is Windows 8 64 Bit [tomshardware.com]. It doesn't really mean a whole lot to me when I'm running a 64 bit distribution of GNU/Linux. Also the tests are selected by Tom's Hardware as a suite... some of these tests are fairly meaningless to me and I feel like something like cold start time should be more heavily weighted than, say, hardware acceleration performance. The wait time on start up affects everyone and is unavoidable where hardware acceleration is nice but also not something I focus on. Also, why is a topic like "security" included in a "performance" test? I think standards compliance and security should be separated out to their own scores.

On all my systems I start the system when I boot up and it stays running pretty much indefinitely. When I am done with the system for the day I just hibernate the system. I just care how well the browser works over time and that it doesn't go nuts memory wise. Since my laptop has 16GB of ram I worry very little about the browser.

I do like hardware acceleration a lot though. What I find is that it translates to better battery usage and the system runs faster while also running longer.

Overall I care about performance, standard compliance, security, responsiveness, and to some extent memory usage. At this point though it doesn't really matter if you choose Firefox or Chrome.

The Fx on my system has serious issues with start up time. I'm not sure what the problem is exactly, but it's gotten quite bad lately. I suspect that it has something to do with the large number of bookmarks I have as I don't have very many extensions installed and I'm carrying over bookmarks from years ago because I haven't bothered to go in and clean house.

Hardware acceleration gives you nice smooth scrolling. It is also vital for Firefox because they changed the way images are decoded in a misguided attempt to reduce memory consumption. Instead of decoding images are as they are loaded they are now decoded as they are displayed, so unless you have top-notch hardware with full acceleration scrolling judders like mad on pages with medium sizes images.

A geometric mean has that effect (unit-independent figures of merit) only if its constituents "poijt in the same direction". If you multiply opposing figures, a browser can put out 25% less work over a fixed time (as in fps) and take 33% more time for a fixed-workload test, and both changes would cancel out..

I regularly see my Firefox cracking a gig of memory. Then after a few days use it often starts getting weird. Then when I try to quit it the damn thing won't go away so I have to do a "Force Quit". I primarily keep using it because firebug is so good.

Same here. It can get so large and complicated in memory that it takes 10 minutes to quit. This seems to be mostly limited to the Mac version. I'm a slave to vertical tabs, though, so I haven't used Chrome since they abandoned that feature.

Go on add-on diet friend. I'm using just lastpass and status-r-evar (stupid name, yes) and I barely see it climb over 600MB. It usually sits around 500MB. Also, I have it set up so that plugins start on-demand.

Are you sure that it's Fx and not an extension you're running? The only times I see Fx using more than 512mb of RAM is when I'm playing one of those stupid flash games. And most of the time Fx is using less than 300mb or so of RAM.

I suppose you might also have a much larger number of tabs open than I do, but still.

It's no defense of Firefox, but one, not-fully-solved issue is crufty profiles. Over time a profile *can* acquire database corruptions as well as other issues (like already uninstalled addons having changed and left about:config settings). These can all lead up to:

- Poor memory use

- Slow startup/shutdown

- Increased jitters & pauses

- Instability

The profile isn't always the issue, but if you've chased down other potential causes (poorly behaving addons, plugins, etc) and your profile is a year or two old

I think this is due to Firebug and some websites. Quite often I have to restart Firefox because it has become sluggish after using Firebug for a while. I haven't taken the time to further investigate the issue.

I cut back on Firefox because it froze up on me too many times on sites with Flash - even with Flashblock enabled and all software updated. I do most of my surfing on Chrome now.

However, the reason why I typically run three browsers at a time at work is this: one for my corporate ID (IE), one for web surfing and personal sites (Chrome), and one for my alternate IDs (Firefox). I know Google Chrome is capable of split personalities (i.e. Incognito mode); if there was one feature that would get me to consoli

I still use FireFox as my browser but I agree, in the last two or three versions I've seen FireFox crashing and restarting much more than it ever did before and in the last six months it seems to me that FireFox is not as responsive as it once was.

Also I've seen at least once a day (most of the time 3 or more times) "the flash plugin has crashed" or "the flash plugin has stopped responding" and I have to click "Stop plugin" to continue. I'm not saying this is a FireFox problem as it could be a Flash plugin

if there was one feature that would get me to consolidate to a single browser it would be the ability to run multiple instances as different personalities at the same time.

firefox -ProfileManagerfirefox -P

Maybe i'm reading your request wrong, but that sounds like exactly what you are looking for. I do wish it was integrated into the firefox browser window menu's themselves though (ie. it'd be nice to hit: File->New Profile Window->Profile Name).

That said, I end up doing the same thing but I divide them up a little differently based on "long running stuff that I'm ok with restarting all at once but don't want to be interrupted by other stuff - ex. gmail, calendar, etc i

The "switch to different user" isn't quite what I'm looking for. I want something that allows me to be signed on to Gmail and other services as three different users (day job, personal, side business, etc.) at the same time.

Uh, that's exactly what chromes profiles do. I've got 2 different chrome windows right now, both logged into their own gmail accounts. Now, if you want them in the same window, that's not possible. The only way to do that is with gmail's "switch user" feature, but that's gmail specific, and doesn't isolate all of your data (cookies, history, etc) the way chrome profiles do.

It doesn't matter that much if one is slightly faster in Javascript or rendering when Firefox will halt up for 5-10 seconds rendering a new tab. Maybe it's faster than Chrome, but if I have to wait for it, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much Firefox devs work on "UI sluggishness" if it's a single thing can lock up all input to the browser.

There's also the intuitiveness and cleanness of the UI in Chrome. It's fast, and it does things I didn't even know I wanted it to do (like rendering my bookmarks toolbar within the browser window in new tabs when I've hidden it.) I was a big Firefox advocate several years ago, but they're going to have to do a lot more than being slightly faster at loading certain parts of a web page to get me off Chrome now.

That's subjective. I can't stand the stripped-down Chrome-style UI. In fact one of my biggest complaints about Firefox (still my main browser) over the last couple of years have been the "Chromification" of the UI.

The test with the biggest difference was memory usage, with Firefox using half the memory of Chrome. This matches comparisons I have done. If you ever have to use an older computer with 2GB of RAM Chrome is pretty much unusable while Firefox works fine. I have an SSD so I turned off virtual memory. With 8GB of RAM I would have to close Chrome if I want to play a game but have no problems with Firefox.

The test with the biggest difference was memory usage, with Firefox using half the memory of Chrome. This matches comparisons I have done. If you ever have to use an older computer with 2GB of RAM Chrome is pretty much unusable while Firefox works fine. I have an SSD so I turned off virtual memory. With 8GB of RAM I would have to close Chrome if I want to play a game but have no problems with Firefox.

With these results, and Firefox developers focusing in fixing the UI sluggishness, can this be the start of a Firefox comeback, after years of slow market share decline?"

I see these sorts of "performance" comparisons all the time. As I type this I have both Chrome and Firefox open and in use and honestly I cannot see any meaningful difference in speed between them. I'm sure some benchmark suite could find a difference but in day to day usage it simply does not matter which I choose. Any difference in speed on my computers is basically insignificant.

I have had problems with Chrome's printing being flakey but it's not a speed issue.

As all browsers get faster, developers can write more complex applications (or...unfortunately, write worse code and no one will notice).

We have a very complex JavaScript app here, and as browsers get faster, we can add more features. We have to gracefully degrade for old versions of IE (not in term of features, but in term of how "pretty" these features are...animations and stuff) but that's it. If Firefox or whatever were not keeping up, we could not

... Firefox by a relatively small margin. Indeed, in some areas, Firefox is slow, other areas, such as Javascript, Firefox is, at best, middling.

.
At this point, if you are deciding upon which browser to use, perhaps the browser with the marginally highest performance benchmark numbers may not be the browser for you.
Here is a difference that matters more to me: when I change the http proxy settings in Firefox, only Firefox is affected. However, when i change the http proxy settings in Chrome, the proxy settings for Windows are changed, meaning that other applications are affected. For this reason I use Firefox instead of Chrome, even though Firefox is a lot slower on a web page I frequent a lot [comcast.net].

Maybe it's that javascript engines don't matter as much anymore? Chrome loads pages and responds so much faster than Firefox. I would like to use Firefox, but it's a dramatic difference in performance between the two browser. Can anyone explain why?

I think it's the pauses. This is mostly speculation, but from what I understand Firefox runs very quickly but much of it is still single-threaded (or in simpler terms, most of what it does is running in a single sequential order). That means Firefox might be doing important calculations lightning fast in the background, but while those calculations are running the graphical window in front of you pauses temporarily. Chrome is better at multi-threaded, multi-process execution, so the user interface is responsive while background work happens.

Both might take 12 seconds to render a particular web page, but Chrome might load one visual element every few tenths of a second for the entire 12 seconds. Firefox will appear to load half the page, freeze for 9 seconds, then load the last bits. Either way you're done in 12 seconds, but Firefox gives the impression of being painfully slow.

Only the worst of Java-script heavy pages slow down on modern hardware with any of the browsers. 99.999% of the time the "slow" is because of AJAX queries to an unresponsive website, and there is bugger all the browser can do about that.

I tweak code performance beyond reasonableness, too. It's a "hacker thing." But it's not something the user can really see or notice once the first rounds of tuning are done, though. But there's an ego involved in producing the best and fastest code possible, even if no one else can tell the difference without a nanosecond stopwatch.

The comparison is from last month, and if you read the iOS post about the browsers, you can see the testing methodology changed a bit. But still, using the new tests, Firefox still comes out in the back, altough in that case Opera surpasses Chrome. That part will be updated very soon.

Geometric mean is useful for comparing when the expected range or units of values is different. For example, startup time is measured in seconds, but BrowsingBench numbers are things like the unitless 6646. The arithmetic mean would fail to "normalize" these values and give disproportionate weight to some over others; the geometric mean is one way of trying to account for this.

Well, once you get past the tech savvy crowd which is like 1% of the browsing population, even if Firefox truly beats Chrome by a big margin, I don't think this is going to change things one bit for Firefox.

Chrome is bundled with Java, Acrobat and Flash updates, which ~98% of computers in the world have. Forget a checkbox in a hurry because you want to do something useful and Chrome is installed.

It is bundled with many PCs by the OEMs who get paid for it.

It is constantly advertised on TV and on Google properties like Google search engine and Youtube, especially to Opera and IE users.

Mozilla doesn't have the resources to do the above and,all this explains Chromes' growth among the nontech crowd more than just performance differences.

I have personally seen many folks for who I installed Firefox back in the day end up using Chrome. When I ask them, most of the time they don't have no idea how they got it. Google's been sinking a lot of money into Chrome over the years(even paying websites $1 per download they drive) and it makes sense because one more Chrome install they don't have to pay money to Firefox and Opera for being the default search for another user. Benchmarks are not going to change any of this.

So what's your theory on why Tom's Hardware would change their ranking system specifically to engineer a Firefox victory?

I know people joke about never reading TFA, but knee-jerk cynicism is no replacement for actual knowledge. If you're going to accuse someone of deceit, you really ought to at least check on who's making them claim in the first place.

god-fucking-dammit how many freaking times do we have to tell you that firefox is not disabling that option, its simply hiding it from the options menu. You can still disable javascript through the about:config menu (javascript.enable) and addons like noscript.

about:config is the browser equivalent of the Windows registry or/etc/ files. Unless you're actually doing something a computer professional would need to do, it's a failure of user interface to require the user to do it.

I really think the Firefox people think of it like hiding an option to make your feet a valid target on a hypothetical "smart" shotgun. It's an intentional user interface failure because they actually don't want you to shoot yourself in the foot.
Of course, if you're a professional who "knows what you're doing", then you can easily change a text file or install No Script.

Unless you're actually doing something a computer professional would need to do, it's a failure of user interface to require the user to do it.

What? Mozilla is now requiring everyone to use about:config? I haven't had to do that yet, have they just not gotten to me yet? Will my family also be required to do it, or can I do it for them?

Oh, what's that? You only need to use it if you're disabling Javascript, or changing any of the other minutiae that only a super-user who isn't going to be angry or confused at seeing about:config would bother changing in the first place? Doesn't seem like such a problem to open about:config, type "javascript" i

There's nothing stopping you from sticking with Firefox 22. While later versions will have more support for more modern standards, if you're not going to run Javascript then it's not going to matter a whole lot what the new standards are.

In the meantime, understand too that while Firefox 23+ may not provide a UI to disable JS across the browser, it is still a low-level setting for now in about:config, and Firefox continues to be the only browser that supports extensions - meaning that options like YesScript, NoScript, and to a lesser extent Ad-block+ will always be available to provide the functionality you're after.

To the people responding "But other browsers support extensions! You're an idiot!", yes, technically you're right, but I'm referring to the specific type of extension that would allow something like NoScript/YesScript to be viable, and I'm talking about mainstream browsers (no, Konqueror is not mainstream.)

Yes, I'm technically wrong, but in terms of the point I was trying to make, not in any way that matters.

As always, you can disable it yourself within about:config. Or use an extension like NoScript, etc to disable it per-site. You likely knew this and were trolling as most folks who are whining about this setting change are.
Mozilla is removing the disable JavaScript box from Options as a browser without JS turned on is pretty useless today. A ton of sites won't work right. Most web developers don't even bother to check for JS being disabled anymore, nor should they as JS exists everywhere and in every m

How many people used the "disable javascript" option? NoScript is so superior that most people that would use disable javascript have or should have switched to NoScript. An option that nobody uses or nobody should use is the very definition of an option that should be removed.

Mozilla is taking the same direction that google is at this point. I used to love Fx, but now I tolerate it. With the asinine version number bumping, the UI tweaks for no particular purpose and them taking their eye off of the ball when it comes to real improvements.

Seems like I should just use Chrome because the Mozilla devs seem to want to turn Fx into Chrome.

not to mention there still are huge memory leaks. I had a fresh machine no addons after running for a week firefox was running really sluggish (chrome was running great). Firefox was using 1 gig of ram.. this with 10 tabs open. I quit firefox, restarted, reloaded the 10 tabs and it worked fine again

The lack of a clear and rock solid standard for how to render the HTML/CSS combination is probably part of the problem of "never been able to draw webpages correctly". Shouldn't I get a pixel perfect identical display from the same web site content, on each different browser? If not, and left up to the interpretation of the browser developers, then expect crap.

Just set gfx.direct2d.disabled=true and the problem is solved. That's what the fix for the bug is anyway (they'll do it automatically with a hardware blacklist). It isn't like Mozilla can force AMD to fix their broken, abandoned drivers.

Last time I checked, Safari wasn't available for Windows anymore. And Safari is very good on OS X, hence the reason why psergiu asked why it was left out. Maybe the next Firefox still sucks on OS X too. I mean, why should I care about Firefox for Windows if I don't use Windows?